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For anybody that was slightly confused by the expression, “knock its fuck in:”

A bear attacked our garbage last night. This is the second time a bear has done so, and I’d bet that it’s the same bear. My girlfriend thinks that it’s the same bear we saw about a week ago near a Dunkin Donuts at about 6AM, rollicking across somebody’s front yard.

Lilly gets totally spooked when the bear comes by (I don’t blame her).

The bear totally absconded with one bag–I have no idea where it went–but there was another bag which we did see, and it was torn to SHREDS. It had used kitty litter in it… and there was all kinds of crap in there, to say nothing of incredibly malodorous kitchen trash.

So I went to the store and bought a bottle of ammonia. I soaked the lid of the trash receptacle in ammonia and put it on damp. It’ll reek like urine, but maybe the bear will stay away now. If not, I’ve got a nice, full bottle of ammonia that’ll knock that bear’s fuck in.

Fantaaaaastic! (If you haven’t seen it yet, haha.)

I’m feeling stuck.

I feel like I’m circling the drain, career-wise, and that I’ll never ever really get up to the point where I’m successful and I’ll feel proud of a long line of career accomplishments.

I have good rapport with interviewers, generally speaking, but after talking a while, it becomes obvious than I’m far more “hat” than “saddle” and they pass me over.

Surely being in depression for the past fifteen or so years of my life hasn’t helped foster an internal environment of success (or at least having the ability to learn from my failures)… so now I’m 28 years old and I really feel like I’m stuck.

I cite my age only because it seems to me that, by now, I ought to have accomplished something with my talents… but it seems that all I take on are the easy jobs, the frustrating jobs, the jobs that do not advance my career and leave me with an ever-shrinking window of marketability.

In all of this, there’s probably some underlying core belief that’s driving these feelings, something that I’m only tangentially aware of, if at all.

I suspect it’s something along the lines of the feelings of worthlessness that were imputed by my parents… but I don’t know if it’s that simple. Even if that is something to be considered, I don’t know how to go about fixing it so that I can just get on with my life.

That’s what I want to do. Get on with my life, and I just feel like I can’t, which is, I’m sure, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think I sum it up best when I say, “Argh.”

Nothing else of note to relate here, just thought I’d mention it.

Didn’t take more than a week, and I’m glad I enabled Akismet.

Haha, I love it. I just received an email from a Customer Advocate at Dell… it looks like it’s not necessarily a problem that I popped open my computer, though I do have a few corrections on my rants that I’ll point out after I display his email and my response:

James,

My name is DellGuy and I am a Customer Advocate located in Dell’s corporate headquarters. I have read your posts about your notebook repair and would like to assist in any way that I can. First of all I would like to state that nothing you have done should void your warranty. I do not know if you got the motherboard issue worked out or not, but if you can get me the service tag of the system or maybe a dispatch number, I would like to look into what happened and try to prevent things like this from occurring in the future.

I would be more than willing to send out a technician again (If you feel comfortable with that), or setup a service to have the machine repaired by our depot. If you prefer I can also send you a shipping label to have the machine sent directly to me and I will repair it myself.

As you said on the 19th, Dell is online and searching blogs. However we are not here to spy or lurk, we want to reach out and engage with our customers.

If there is anything I can do to help, or if you would just like to relay some feedback, please just shoot me an email.

Thanks,
DellGuy

Hi DellGuy!

I’m not at all bothered by the fact that you’ve read my blog. I was almost counting on it, though the warranty issue was the wildcard for me. It’s good to know that this won’t be considered a problem.

The motherboard was replaced and the system is otherwise functional, so that I do not have a problem with that at all. It was the fact that the notebook was handed back to me essentially in a state of disrepair, with screws loose and missing, and all of that. I’m glad I decided to open up the case a second time so that I could inspect what was causing the right-hand side of the palm rest to rise up, because it was then I discovered a very loose screw on the inside of the system which, if it had come out, could have caused severe damage to my notebook.

Unfortunately, I am not in the position where I can ship my notebook out for service. I suppose that having another technician sent out would be the most timely solution for me. I would most prefer to have a manifest of screws shipped to me so I can install them myself this time around, but if this is not an option, I understand.

Perhaps part of the problem I had was that the technician I got was relatively inexperienced (as she herself admitted) with computers and was in something of a hurry. I also think it was a third-party dispatch service, so it wouldn’t have been a technician employed directly by Dell. I didn’t exactly mention this in my blog, so I’m going to post these notes as a correction of my oversight.

My system’s service tag is ABCD123, and the warranty repair happened in March or April of this year. Actually, it should be the only time a technician was ever sent out to service my machine, so it shouldn’t be hard to track this one down.

Best regards,

James

After re-reading my earlier entries, I realize that they sounded a little paranoid. But as I noted in my email to DellGuy (pretty unique name, don’t you think?), I was kind of counting on it being noticed, but I was uncertain about the warranty.

So far, I have had a fairly good customer experience with Dell… it was mostly that when the tech handed back to me a half-put-together notebook that I got a little irritated… but, busy as I am, I guess I didn’t want to deal with it until I absolutely had to. Heh. It took a few months for me to get irritated with the screen flopping around and the keyboard being all weird and stuff, I suppose.

Oh, and funny bit–he sent it to my gmail account. I thought I might have had my personal email published somewhere around here, but it got to me just the same.

So, three cheers for Dell! No, really, they doing me a solid on this one. I know some people have horror stories, but really, so far, I’ve done pretty well with them. I’ll need to upgrade or buy a new computer eventually, so I’ll probably stick with ‘em when the time comes… and this time, I’ll order the CD/DVD burner AND the extra-large hard drive! (Kicking myself over “how am I going to fill up 60GB on my notebook? I’ve got plenty of storage on my server!” Feh.)

Oh, and I’m not sure if I got this across… I’m actually rather impressed that Dell goes out and reads related blogs. I’m sure they get a lot of heat from some paranoiacs, but really, if you post something on the Internet, it’s public. Even if you’ve posted it privately, you can’t depend on it remaining that way.

Honestly, though, next time… I guess I really should call them and be a little less passive-aggressive.

Oh oh, one final note. I work with computers daily. I do software programming and I’ve done my share of hardware maintenance and repair. The only reason I felt comfortable risking a violation of my warranty is because this is the sort of thing I do day in, day out. The main reason I got the warranty is because notebooks get a LOT of wear and tear and I did not want to risk being out $2000 or so because it got dropped or something. I just want to be clear on this in case some random individual reads this (not really any of my friends or family) and thinks that they can just screw around without knowing what they’re doing.

Okay, now I think I am of a mind to complain.

When I had cracked open my notebook to peek inside to see what was causing the ill-fitting-ness, I thought, “Oh, two minor-ish things, no big deal.” But when I put it back together, there was a definite “rise” over the right-hand side of the mousepad.

This might have been caused by my screwing around, but I really don’t think so.

The reason I say this is because THE SYSTEM BOARD WAS NOT SECURED WITH ANY SCREWS.

It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that my computer was shipped without any screws and that the tech did not have any spare screws on hand to replace the missing parts… but somehow I really, really doubt this.

Now… it’s easy to drop screws when you’re working on stuff like this… they’re tiny, and virtually disappear even in plain sight sometimes. Hell, even normal computer screws can just sort of disappear, and laptop screws are generally smaller by a factor of 2, right?

Well, problem is, my laptop is currently missing at least a half dozen 5.25mm screws, half a dozen 8mm screws, and 1 3mm screw. The incompetence of the tech they sent me is absolutely staggering. If my warranty is canceled at this point, I might not care, because I don’t think I want somebody else with that level of incompetence touching my property ever again.

I’ll have to get my hands on the appropriate quantities of missing screws (and a few extra) so I can replace those and feel secure about my laptop’s physical state. I’ve already gone in pretty deep with this, so I won’t pretend this is “just a quickie.”

But worse than this… not only were screws missing, but the screws that were there were very loose. One screw in the system board was about ready to pop out! No screws had come out entirely, thank goodness, because that could have fried my system, and then where would I be?

I will say that I am finally happy with the way the screen is solid, though. I guess those screws just come loose through normal use, though it should have been this tight when the tech handed me the laptop, telling me that she was finished.

I’ve got a bit of an issue, server-wise, and I’m not quite sure how to distill it into search terms for google.

What’s happening is I’ve got a debian server running 2.4.32 with a Lite-On LNE100TX (rev 20) network card. The problem I’m having is that network communications will occasionally just stop.

These might be two separate issues, but the first place it’s been happening (with almost maddening results) is when I am logged in to my server via PuTTY. Occasionally, the putty window will simply stop updating. The odd part about this is that the ssh tunnel appears to still be active, because I can perform keyboard input and things on the server change (I’ve touched a file with the screen frozen).

The second place it’s been happening is when I’m working on my blog. It’s probably time for a new server, but I’m not even sure where to go to begin debugging this. Network traffic appears to be OK using tcpdump, but webpages on this end will just up and die.

It’s possible that it’s my laptop, too… but I don’t have problems with other ssh hosts or websites. It’s also possible that it’s my router, but I can’t afford to replace anything right now.

It’d be so cool if somebody had a few pointers, something for me to inspect. It’ll probably just be easier to buy a new server altogether (and, in fact, when I have the cash, I intend to do just that).

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